


Little House

by Cards_Slash



Series: Underbelly [2]
Category: CW Network RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Gen, Soul Bond, Werewolves, soul mates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 05:24:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris' childhood was made of all the very worst things.</p><p>(side story to Underbelly, not necessarily able to stand alone)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little House

When Chris was born, it was in the dirt of his father’s family den. The walls had been rubbed smooth by generations of too-large wolves turning circles before sleeping and the ground had been packed down by heavy bodies that wore grooves like little nests into the earth. His grandmother had been there back then, a quiet and steadfast old woman that had learned long ago that a wise woman never spoke out of turn. She licked his mother’s wolf face while his father stood outside—away from the unpleasantness of birth.

He was born with four legs and a tail, like an animal. (Years and years later he thought but never knew for sure that maybe his mother had hated him for that.)

\--

Chris was two or maybe three years old, toddler-sized with four legs and a constantly wagging tail when his mother finally had enough energy to pick herself up off the floor of the den. He didn’t know much about her—strange woman that she was—just that she’d been there to give birth to him and that she had been there in the den like a emaciated lump that barely had the energy to breath while his father took him out and taught him to hunt trails and dig and watched him indulgently while he rolled in the dirt with the other young pups.

When his mother lifted her body from the floor the dirt fell off her coat and her legs stumbled before she caught herself and found her balance again. Her eyes were strange—different than the others—and she looked at him in a way that nobody else did. At three he thought she must have been some kind of other-thing but he had no idea what the hell those other-things were. He only knew the smell of them when his father shoved against his side and made him turn back and not go forward toward that strange scent. She regarded him and then stepped up to him on tender paws and sniffed at his fur, snuffled at his ears and his face and ran her long-rough tongue against his fur.

He followed her out of the den, to the great open spaces beyond and she took him in circles until they found themselves on the very edges of the places that were alpha’s (Chris didn’t know, at three, what lived beyond those edges but he knew he wasn’t allowed to know either). She sat in the dirt with her tail swept up close to her body and looked around the trees that grew close together in clumps. He trotted up to lay against her legs, his little body heavy with the warmth of the evening and the excitement of running circles around her. She cocked her head at him and he barked at her and licked at the air because he liked her—stranger that she was. She leaned down to lick him again, against the ticklish fur on his neck and his face. He yawned while she cleaned him and the noise she made sounded almost (not that he would know it for years) like a lullaby.

\--

Chris was four when his mother became the other-thing for the first time. She had been leaving the den during the day, sneaking out on her tender paws and his father seemed amused by her persistence and allowed it. Chris thought it was just silly to sneak when she could have gone anywhere inside the lines of the alpha’s territory. Sometimes he wanted to go with her but his father caught him by the skin at the back of his neck and rolled him back inside the den with his slow-dying grandmother. He hated the smell of her and the sight of her. (When the alpha called for her, at last, Chris was glad that she was gone.)

But when he was four his father had gone to the alpha and he followed his mother away from the den, through the trees—barking at her back legs and hurrying across the underbrush that snagged in his fur and tried to hold him back. He hurried and she kept her pace slow so he could follow. When they reached the edge of the alpha’s land where the trees grew close together he found a pile of strange trees lying across the ground all flattened out with no bark and no leaves. There were other trees like that standing upright and a box with strange things in it that he ran across to sniff at. They smelled like the other-things that his father never let him near.

Chris turned back to his mother with a whine and found a strange thing with no fur and two legs and no tail standing where she’d been. He yelped and ran and the strange thing looked so _sad_ on her strange face—he fell into the pile of trees and his leg got caught and he shrieked little howls with all the power of his lungs because he was hurt and scared and—

“Chris,” the strange thing said to him. It started to make that noise like his mother made and held out its hands toward him. Slowly-slowly that strange thing pulled him free from the trap he’d found himself in and ran her fingers through his fur and soothed his fears. He lay against her skin, held in her arms and whined what he didn’t understand. When she set him down he knew from the smell of her that this strange thing was his mother. “I’m a human, Chris. I always have been. You are too—you can be. You don’t have to be a wolf.” Her fingers were soft on his ears and the back of his neck where the skin rolled up (where his father caught him and threw him when he misbehaved). Then she stood up out of the dirt and found things to cover her body with (they were clothes, he knew later) and she picked up the box of strange things (tools) and stood by the strange trees (planks of wood) and bit her lip. 

Chris sat on his rear and watched her, tail tucked up close to his body. She stayed there most of the day, banging on those strange trees to make them stand upright. He barked at her while she worked and she talked to him.

“It’s a house,” she told him, “or at least as much a house as I can make in the middle of the damn woods by myself. I never was a carpenter you know so fuck if I know if this thing is even going to stand but I can’t stand sleeping in a hole in the ground anymore.” She licked her lips while she worked and got shiny and wet (with sweat he found out later). 

At the end of the day, long after he had fallen asleep watching her, she licked his face to wake him up and when he whined and kicked his feet at her she caught him in her teeth and carried him through the trees until it started to hurt and then he wiggled his way free and trotted next to her. 

His father was furious, pacing the den, all teeth and rough barks. He kicked Chris into the den hard enough it made him hurt and he tore into his mother with those loud-hard barks and his long-sharp teeth so that when she limped through the open door of the den the smell of blood was in her fur. She caught Chris by the back of the neck and pulled him into the corner she slept in and curled her body around his with her tongue soothing his hurt. 

\--

That house had a roof before Chris figured out how to turn his wolf body into a boy’s body. He’d tried ti before but the sudden feeling of breaking apart at all the joints and seams scared the holy hell out of him and he never could manage it. But he closed his eyes and let it happen and when the change came like a rush of snapping and twisting he screamed in his wolf throat and heard it in his human ears as the bleating shriek of a frightened other-thing. He found himself bare and two-legged on the dirt of the forest floor with his mother at his side and her work-rough hand touching his toddler-soft skin in a way that hurt more than her wolf teeth nipping at his wolf skin ever had. 

The sensory overload was terrifying to him—everything was different colors, different sounds, different smells and he threw himself against her body in an uncoordinated lurch and hid his face against her neck and the familiar smell of her damp skin. She rubbed his back and hummed her lullaby to him until the terror passed. Then she laid a blanket on the dirt for him to sit on.

He couldn’t talk like that, couldn’t bark like that, didn’t have any idea how to make the words that she made. He felt stupid, mute and _wrong_. For the first few minutes he couldn’t even figure out how to work the strange hairless limbs and didn’t like the feel of the length of hair that came from the top of his new head. His nose felt too short and his mouth felt too small and his tongue was slippery like a worm across the roof of his mouth and across his lips. He turned his new hands over and over again, thought they looked too small and his feet looked kind of stupid. 

When he figured it out, how to plant his feet against the ground and push himself up on them, conquered gravity and mastered balance, he stumbled over to where his mother was back working on the house and caught the edge of her shirt in his pudgy little fingers and tugged at it. He wanted to ask her things, wanted to know things, wanted to hear her talk and she looked back at him with a smile.

“You’re a handsome boy,” she told him. Her thumb touched his cheek and he turned his head to bite at it because he didn’t understand what she was saying or how to talk to her. “No,” she said to him.

He whined at her—surprised himself and her and then felt his face twist up in a grin and thought (at first) that he must have broken this strange new face of his. He pointed at her, stabbed his finger into her skin until she smacked his hand and then he stomped his foot and whined and pointed at her again and again.

“What?” she asked him.

He whined louder-louder and beat his curled up fingers against her. 

“Chris stop.” She caught his wrists in her hands and dropped down on her knees in front of him. He had strange tears on his face and she looked so sad. Then she took his fists with her hands around them and pushed them toward his chest. She said: “Chris.” Then she pulled them back toward her and said, “Mom.”

\--

Chris knew before he was old enough to understand all the words that his mother spoke to him, that he could never ever tell his father about what she was teaching him. When they went closer in toward the center of the territory with the other wolves and the alpha he found others that were other-things like his mother was and like he could be. His father scowled at them and snarled at them and sat with the tall wolves that always stank like the alpha did. 

When they went there, in toward the council place, he had to stay with his father, at his feet and wasn’t allowed to run with the other boys that wore their other-thing skin and played with their skinny legs and skinny arms. Some of them knew single words but most of them seemed as much like wolves to him as they did when they were wearing fur.

\--

Sometimes, his mother went away without him and snarled at Chris in the den and made him stay. When he couldn’t follow her away he followed his father around through the forest and learned to hunt and kill and _run_. He met the alpha’s son out in the forest and cocked his head at the puny little puppy that didn’t seem much like anything but anyone else. He wanted to play with him, wanted to run with him but the alpha stepped through the trees when he stepped forward and snarled at him with his teeth all bared. 

Even the alpha’s son whimpered and tucked his tail but Chris dropped his belly to the ground and put his paws across his eyes. He felt teeth on the back of his neck and he was being carried away from the alpha and the alpha’s son. His father dropped him in the hard dirt and butted him forward with his face, made him fall and nipped at his legs when he cried that he’d been hurt. Another snarl followed after him when he got up again and when they made it back to the den his father shoved him inside and wouldn’t let him out again.

\--

Chris was almost five before he said his first word. It was an odd mangled sound in his throat that he shaped into a word. His mother was working on putting the strange things she’d brought from other-places into the little house she’d built in the forest. He was sitting against the wall with one of the books with the colored pictures of other-things smiling and looking pleased and happy in his lap. He stared at the picture, the smaller other-things (like him) the other-thing that looked like his mother and he pointed his finger against it and he said: “Mom.”

She dropped the books she was holding when he said it and the look on her face delighted him so he said it again. “Mom,” with his finger against the page. His face made that twisted-up grin again.

“Yes,” she said to him, “yes, that’s Mom.”

\--

Once he started talking he didn’t stop trying out other words that she’d said to him. With the books of pictures and the whole world all around them she taught the words for everything that he saw or smelled or felt. He learned nouns and verbs and adjectives. When he ran in the forest he barked words at the birds and trees and grass and dirt.

Out in the house at the edge of the alpha’s world he sat tucked under her arm while she patiently read him stories that he interrupted and repeated and she answered his every pointed finger as if she were just discovering the word herself.

\--

When Chris was seven (and getting smart) his mother took him out of the alpha’s world for the first time. She pulled on her clothes and she packed a small bag with other things and while his father was out and away she led him away, through the forest and the familiar smell of the territory. She walked fast with him at her heels. When they came to the end of the forest she stopped for a minute and looked down at him then cleared her throat and crouched down next to him. She said, “Chris. This is where the humans live. Don’t be frightened, I won’t let anything happen to you.”

He licked her hands and followed after her with his tail wagging. The whole other-world was a confusing mass of bad smells and sights and too many things on two legs rushing and running into each other. They spoke too fast for him to understand and moved in wide circles around one another and he couldn’t figure out who was the alpha of this strange world. She walked with him at her side (like a dog, but it would be years before he knew that) and when a truck with a jingle stopped at the side of the sidewalk his mother bought him an ice cream.

She sat on the curb with him half in her lap and his dog tongue licking at it furiously, teeth nipping into the cool-sweetness of it while it melted down her fingers and he licked those clean too. When he was done he wagged his tail so hard it felt like his whole body was swaying and fought his way up to lick her face. She dragged her hand down his fur to pet him and then stood up and kept walking.

In the bathroom of a bus station she pulled clothes out of her bag that were too small for her to wear and she said, “change.”

He turned into a little boy with a dirty face and sticky fingers and she scrubbed him clean in the sink using rough towels and pink soap. He stepped into the clothes she held for him—rough feeling pants and a soft cotton T-shirt and then she pulled a pair of scissors out of her bag and cut his dirty hair off close to his skin and scrubbed what was left of it clean in the sink. When she was done and he was feeling rubbed raw she smiled at him and kissed his nose.

“You’re a handsome boy.” She stood him on the sink and turned him so he could see himself. He looked gangly, his limbs too long, his belly too round and his head too big. His hair was chopped in odd peaks and still wet and dripping on his face. His lips were pink and he wondered how he had never known that before. His nose was small and his eyes were wide and _blue_.

“That’s me?” he asked her and pushed his finger against the mirror.

“Yes,” his mother said. Then she put shoes on him that were too big and made him stumble so she carried him up to the strange men that stared at them and then took her paper and gave her stiffer paper that they called tickets. “We’re going to the beach,” she told him.

She carried him onto the bus and found a seat near the back and set him by the window. The bus smelled terrible and it lurched and moved on its own but she brought his favorite book and held it open for him and helped him pick out letters and words that he remembered and held him close when the sounds of the road moving around them scared him.

At the beach, the whole world ended in a pile of dirt so loose it clung to him and then gave way to nothing but water as wide and deep as eternity. His mother took his shoes back and sat in the loose dirt called _sand_ and touched his face. “Go play,” she said.

“Like this?” he asked her.

“Just like this,” she said. Then she sent him away as a human boy to play in the rolling, bubbling surf and other boys came to play with him too. They asked him his name and he called himself Chris because that’s what his mother had always called him. He listened to them talk and talk and talk just like she talked and he chased them and the surf and dug in the wet sand for shells and fish and sea monsters (but he didn’t know what they were).

At the end of the day, when they were laying out under the darkening skin and he was exhausted and salty and curled against her body, she kissed his forehead and she said, “Never be afraid, Chris. I’ll always protect you.”

\--

For three days, at the edge of the world, he was a little boy that played on his stick thin legs with other little boys and took their words and made them his own. He ate hot dogs with his feet in the sand and learned how to paddle into the water with his mother’s nervous hands hanging onto his waist under the water. He watched his mother talking to other-things that were mothers too and saw her smile.

When his father came, he came in his other-thing shape and he found them settling down to sleep in a ball away from the other people that would ask questions about a little dog and his mother sleeping in the dirt. His father was wearing strange clothes and he looked wild like a wolf. He caught Chris by the elbow and yanked him back to his feet, shook him as he snarled at him. 

“Stop!” Chris cried.

His father was so shocked he dropped him and by then his mother was on her feet and her fists were beating against his father so hard it sounded like thunder. Chris was scared and when he was scared he always changed back into a wolf, little and tight to the ground and whimpering. His father hit his mother once-and-twice and left blood on her skin and bruises that bloomed up blue and turned black. He pulled her by the hair and barked at Chris with his human throat but his command was understood.

\--

When he was seven, back inside the safety of the alpha’s territory he was brought before the council the first time. He was a miserable ball of fur tucked in tight by his father while his mother stood before the alpha without fear. When he tore at her with his claws she yelped from the pain of it but she got back to her feet and stared him down like he was _nothing_. 

When he was seven, long before he knew anything about soul mates at all, he watched his father drag his mother back to the den. He heard the sound of her yelps when his father raped her while she was hurt. He stood outside the den whining and turning circles—scared and hurt and confused.

\--

The morning after, when his father finished with her, his mother limped out of the den with blood matted in her fur. She walked like she was exhausted, like she had no energy and no will and his father snarled at her with his teeth bared but she just leaned her head down and licked Chris across the face and nudged him up to his feet.

Chris whimpered, whining low in his throat and jumped up against her side, nosing at the blood there, licking at the wound how he’d seen the others doing it. His father caught him by the back of the neck and yanked him back, threw him on the ground and snapped at his belly. 

His mother growled, all low and deep and shoved her body against his father to move him out of the way. She stood over him, one paw moving to shove him back and out of the way while his father circled around her and stopped to snap at her face before he turned and ran into the forest. When he was gone she stepped back and licked at him then started walking.

She took him back to the house, to the blankets that were piled up like a bed and she collapsed there. He attacked her matted fur with teeth and his little tongue and licked and licked at the wounds with the frantic senselessness of a scared little boy. She was still for a while—breathing but not speaking—and when he had almost exhausted himself and made himself sick from the taste of her blood on his tongue, she lifted her head. Her body changed under his paws and the curled edges of the broken skin looked meaner and uglier and more painful in her human skin.

“It’s okay,” she told him. Her hands pulled him up and held him there. “You’re okay. I won’t let him hurt you.”

\--

When Chris was ten (after his mother had taken him away to the circus and to the movies, after she had taught him to read and had just started teaching him how to play games with cards), he found out with the other young wolves that somewhere—out there—he had a _soul mate_ and that he had to find them. If his soul mate wasn’t here, with these wolves, it might be one of the other-things and he had to go and find her and bring her back and make her one of them.

He went to his mother, in the house she’d built, and he turned himself into a little boy and looked at her with his hands in furious fists. “Did he bring you here?” he asked, “are you his soul mate?”

His mother looked scared for the first time ever—scared of him, scared of what he knew now. She was pregnant again (at last) and her hand touched her swollen belly peeking out from under the shirt stretched across her human body. “Yes,” she said.

“Did you want to come?” he asked.

Her face softened, and the tight bunch of her shoulders loosened up. She was covered in scars by the time he was ten, long-ugly marks that were left by the alpha and his father every time she disobeyed. He’d watched her be beaten in front of the pack, he’d been outside the mouth of the den when his father shoved her inside and raped her and now he was standing there while she closed her eyes and let out a breath and then said, “no.”

“I’ll protect you,” he said to her (swore to her) and her smile forgave him for making promises he couldn’t keep. “I will!”

“I know you’ll try,” she said. Then she held out her arm and he came over to wrap his arms around her body. She stroked his hair and kissed his forehead. “You’re a little boy, Chris. If you disobey your father he has the right to kill you and I couldn’t take it. No matter what happens, little boy, no matter _what_ , you take care of yourself.”

\--

Chris was barely eleven when his mother took him away for the last time. She took him to a place where someone made him stand behind a chair his mother sat in and he didn’t much like it or the flash of light that blinded him. He didn’t like it when they kept snapping pictures and then his mother turned in the chair and reached her arm back to catch him around the shoulders. He put both his arms around her and felt the stiffness of the clothes she’d put him in pulling at his skin. She kissed his forehead when the blinding flash came again.

“I think we got it,” the stranger said.

On the way back to the pack, long before his father caught them, she gave him the papers she called pictures. “It’s our family,” she told him.

He tucked the picture away in his clothes and hid it in the sleeping bag she’d brought him to keep at the house. The sleeping bag was tucked up inside of the bookbag she’d gotten that had a C and a W and a P on it. They were back at the den before his father caught them but the smell of the other-world was all over them and they were pulled to the council where the alpha made it clear that if they ever left again his precious prodigal son would kill Chris.

They never left again.

\--

When Chris was maybe fifteen, the other wolves were worrying about soul mates and going into heat. The smell of their bodies made him sick and the stink of the girl-wolves drove him a little crazy. Sometimes he thought about fucking them because that smell meant they were all but begging for it but even while the others were going to charm school to learn how to blend in with the other-things long enough to scent and kidnap their mates he never-ever wanted to go.

His mother was teaching Alona how to read in the house at the edge of the territory when he came in wearing his human skin with his hands in fists. She looked up at him with that old fear in her eyes like she could face down the alpha and his father and the whole world but she couldn’t stand the thought of what he was being taught to do away at the fucking _charm school_ for kidnappers and rapists. (He didn't know, not then, about how you could steal your mate's soul, about how you could make them obey you about how you could make them weak and subservient and how they had no choice at all but to love you for it.)

“I won’t do it,” he told her, “I swear I won’t _ever_ do it.”

Alona cocked her head at her mother and looked confused and his mother swallowed heavy against her own throat and wiped at the edge of her eyes with her thumb. Her nod was slow and she said, in a croak, “I know. When they take you out there maybe you should…not come back.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Chris said, “I’m not leaving you.”

\--

When he was about eighteen, more or less, he was brought before the council to watch Milo and Christian be slaughtered for being gay when it was something so far beyond their control it was sickening. By the time the council was called they were already beaten and limping and trying to look fearless while they were terrified of the alpha pacing in a circle around them. He was going to make an example of them—make a show of it—and then (and _nobody expected it, least of all the alpha_ ), the alpha’s precious son moved from his post by the head of the council and dug his paws into the dirt and let loose a snarl that was a clear challenge to his father.

Christian looked like he couldn’t fucking believe it and Milo (who took the worst of it, who looked barely alive) raised his head and just _stared_. The whole pack was there when Jensen challenged his father, was there to see him get his teeth into his old-man’s hide and tear off a chunk and be taken down. They were there when the alpha’s bitch threw herself on her son and begged with whimpers and pleas for his life.

The alpha sent them away, ordered them hunted to the edge of the territory and gave every wolf permission to kill them on sight. Christian and Milo for being unnatural and disgusting, Mike for refusing to obey his parents, Chris for being the son of his mother and Jensen for being unworthy of his father’s legacy.

They were chased by the feral wolves to the edge of the territory; they fell across the scent lines into the nothing at the edge of the territory where none of the others had ever been. Milo collapsed and Christian paced in nervous circles. Jensen was bleeding from the gashes his father had dug into his side and Mike was nearly mad from the exertion and fear. 

Chris tugged at Mike to get him to help working on Jensen’s bleeding hide and Christian finally settled down enough to lie next to Milo and start working on his bleeding wounds. They stayed there, in busy huddles until his mother found him. She came up on human feet and stopped a distance away.

“They have Alona,” she said to him. Then she threw his bag at him and smiled, “you take care of yourself—and you take care of them.” Then she turned around and walked back the way she came.

**Author's Note:**

> from my [permanent prompt box at livejournal](http://cards-slash.livejournal.com/496081.html): requested: I'd love to read why Chris is so against the whole "soulmate" thing. Mike explained why he was, but Chris' reasoning is still a mystery. Maybe he just hasn't found his yet? I'm curious about that boy! :)


End file.
